Many automated transactions that occur over the Internet require an end-user to provide content in order to complete the transactions. Sometimes, this content is represented as fielded data associated with an electronic form. Form-based transactions are omnipresent on the Internet and they are used for a variety of purposes, such as obtaining support for a product, acquiring goods or services, obtaining information about goods or services, and the like.
For example, when a user requests information from an organization over the Internet using a World-Wide Web (WWW) browser, the user may be presented with a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) browser page (e.g., form) that requires the user to fill in a number of required fields, such as name, address, phone number, and electronic mail (email) address. Some of these forms can be lengthy and require a non-substantial amount of user input and interaction.
Once a form is filled in and includes the proper user-supplied content, which is typically manually supplied by a user, the form is submitted for processing to an automated service that is the object of that form. Unfortunately, if the user is not registered with the automated service or has failed to properly log into the service, then the service will not recognize the request to process the content and will redirect the user to an authentication service for proper authentication.
When this authentication redirection takes place, the user-supplied content is not retained during the redirection. Correspondingly, once the user is properly authenticated for accessing the service, the user is forced to manually re-enter all the content that he/she has already supplied but which has now been lost. This is frustrating, time consuming, often unnecessary, and not user friendly.
Conventionally, when a user obtains a form that is used to gather data (content) for a service, and that form includes an operation which when selected performs a content-bearing operation using the content, the content is lost if the user has not been properly authenticated before executing the operation. Essentially, conventional techniques abandon the form content supplied by an unauthenticated user and redirect the user to an authentication service for initial authentication or for re-authentication if an authenticated session has timed-out. Consequently, after authentication the user must manually re-fill out the form and re-supply the content a second time before achieving the desired content-bearing operation with his/her content.
The loss of content during an authentication redirection is particularly noticeable with Internet transactions occurring with Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) communications and operations. A HTTP redirection transparently occurs when redirection-supported operations, such as GETs are used. However, there are several HTTP operations which do not natively support redirection; some such operations include PUTs, GETs, World Wide Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning operations (WebDAVs), and others. Thus, a content-gathering form represented in a WWW browser as an HTML browser page which includes one of these operations (e.g., PUT, POST, or WebDAVs) will not preserve any user-supplied content before redirecting a non-authenticated user to an authentication service. These operations (e.g., PUT, POST, or WebDAVs) simply ignore a non-authenticated user's content and redirect the user to an authentication service. After authentication, the user must manually reenter his/her content and reprocess the PUT, POST, or WebDAV.
Thus, improved techniques for preserving content during a redirection for authentication are needed.